The Last Guardian moved to PS4 in 2012

According to Shuhei Yoshida, the President of Sony Worldwide Studios, The Last Guardian switched from a PlayStation 3 game to a PlayStation 4 game way back in 2012. The reason for such an early choice to switch to next-gen? They were already hitting technical problems, according to what he told IGN.

“Because of the limitation of the hardware performance, the team was doing their best…but we knew – from a design standpoint- in order to run it on PS3, the team would have to make some compromises in terms of the number of characters and these things,” “Yoshida said. But those limitations didn’t have to happen, because as Fumito Ueda and his team worked on The Last Guardian the PlayStation 4 started to become a reality.

Sony, Yoshida and Ueda all realized how the true potential this game held could be realized, if they just moved the title onto the newer system. “So that’s the decision we made some time in 2012, and after that, the team went back to the drawing board in terms of the tech, because the architecture is so different. But since last year…the game’s playable. So the team is very excited now. And working very hard.” Your hard work shows, and you all deserve to be excited as the officially reintroduction of the game at E3 was beautiful.

The footage shown, was apparently actually playable as Yoshida said that “the video we showed yesterday during the conference, actually you can play like that. It runs, the performance is great, but because it’s an adventure game, it takes a little bit of a long time to show one sequence…so, because the press conference is managed by very tight on time, we decided to show the video.” This choice makes sense, as the video shows everything we wanted to see anyways.

The 2016 release window is looking good as well, as Yoshida said that “the development is going very well, and we have a good amount of confidence in the time that we announced the window that we feel we can hit this time,” he said. “So that’s why we introduced it.”

I was excited for this game when it was first announced, and now that I know the reason behind pushing it back I think it was the best choice. I’m still just as excited for this game- if not, more so now that I know it will run the way everyone originally intended.